Ah, technology.
Far be it for me to declare myself as any kind of "technophobe" (I can process data using the most complicated of databases, get to grips with the most esoteric of electronic gizmos, and work magic with online "solutions" that others find impossible to cope with) yet - as just today, the gnomes at Blogger/Google appear to have republished every one of my blogs since the end of May at the same time into the "Reading List" (that greets us whenever we first log in here), and I sigh at yet another "glitch", and I stare uncomprehending at the glazed breeze-block that passes for my "smart" phone (surely the biggest misnomer in history for something that does everything except process phone calls properly) - I cannot but feel joy at the prospect of the imminent revival of the Nokia brand into the mobile phone market...
Please! Let us return to the days when one could slip one's phone into a jeans pocket and comfortably move around without feeling like some medical device were attached to one's body. The days when phone calls and text messages were the only distractions - not F***book, Tw*tter, "Insta-groan" or the rest - with which people disrupted otherwise civilised conversations in public places; when chargers did not need to be carried around all the time; a time when the benighted "selfie" was something one did with a camera, and then only on holiday, and only when there was no convenient stranger around to embarrassedly ask to "capture that moment"...
I agree with Hannah Jane Parkinson, writing in The Guardian - "classic" Nokias were probably the greatest phones of all time.
And here's the magnificent Pete Shelley with an appropriate song - Telephone Operator:
Telephone operator
You're my aural stimulator
Telephone operator
Ne c'est pas la raison d'etre
Words to live by.
